‘Why is anchoring still such a misunderstood skill?’ – Nikki Henderson

Anchoring, the simple act of deploying a heavy mass to anchor your yacht, is still a fundamental skill, but often misunderstood

As the sun slipped below the horizon, so did the noise of the day. The thermal wind softened, the engine fan stopped whirring, and the last of the tourist boats swung into port. In that quiet moment of reflection that one takes at dusk, I was living every sailor’s dream.

We were anchored off the coast of the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve. This remote north-western tip of Iceland is only accessible by boat. Four or five waterfalls cascaded fresh glacial melt down the horseshoe of mountains and into the fjord that was our home for the night. In this isolated northern outcrop of the globe just the hardiest of sea creatures, birds and puffins went about their business on the rocky shores. Otherwise we were entirely alone.

We are living in the age of hydrofoils, carbon fibre and satellites. Our world is getting faster paced and more determined than ever to leap into the future with greater efficiency. And yet, the core components of the universal sailing experience remain the same: simplicity, stunning scenery, self-sufficiency, serenity and solitude.

Are we putting too much emphasis on cutting-edge technologies and forgetting the fundamentals of a good day on the water? Are we at risk of losing touch with our roots?

Anchoring is – literally – one of sailings’ grounding cornerstones, an ancient art that dates back millennia. Devised not long after the boat itself, anchoring began with a large rock and a rope. By Roman times the original ‘anchor rocks’ were shaped to include prongs making them more transportable and better at temporarily digging into the seabed.

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Modern anchors now have hinge points and different designs to suit boat sizes and seabeds, but they’re still basically a heavy thing attached to a warp. For sailors, anchoring marks a shift from moving to being.

As one of sailing’s most unchanged fundamentals, are we giving anchoring enough credit? It’s easy to become so focussed on optimisation, that we’re perhaps brushing over those core skills. From an educational standpoint, anchoring, like many other basic sailing principles (hoisting and dropping sails, tying knots or driving by the feel of the wind on our faces), is often undertaught and misunderstood.

Recently I hosted a webinar to explain how to deploy or weigh an anchor without a windlass. Many of the participants – regular cruisers and boat owners – hadn’t ever been formally taught how to do it. And if they had been taught, they didn’t really understand the whys and hows.

I explained: sit still counteracting effects of the wind or tidal stream, drop the hook plus two- to four-times the depth of the water in chain or warp or both, fall back against it, see if it holds, and pay about the same amount of warp again. If the electricity fails, pull or ease it by hand and use a mechanical aid like a winch or a purchase system to help you control it.

The wide eyes looking back at me were indicative of the disbelief. Is it really that simple? It’s as if, with everything in sailing becoming so complicated, it can be hard to grapple with something so basic as a pulley system or the effects of a metal hook, chain, gravity and the seabed.

This begs the question, why hasn’t anchoring evolved? Is there a better solution? Just as furling can be more effective than hoisting and dropping, is an anchor just too inefficient?

No. Anchoring is still used, because anchoring works. There’s no computer program that can beat the feel of the boat yanking back on a good set. There is no phone application that can feel as trustworthy as thousands of years worth of evidence proving that something works.

Maybe it could – like other ‘old-school’ practices – be filtered out for a ‘better way’. It’s not that crazy to imagine a future in which we keep the engines on to hold station in one spot overnight because it’s ‘safer’ and easier to fit more boats into a bay if we don’t have to deal with the unknowns of swinging, holding and wind shifts. The memory of a silent night alone will be a tale from ‘the good old days’.

So while I’m all for making sailing more accessible, I think we should tread with caution when it comes to optimisations. We often chase new ideas thinking that improvements and complexity are better, but sometimes simplicity is mastery. Anchoring is a quiet reminder that some things are better left unchanged.

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